OPRAH: I’d just like to say what a great privilege it is to have you with us on the show today, Barry.
BARRY: Thank you, Oprah. I’m so grateful to God for my good fortune just to be here, but my good fortune is all the greater for my both being here and being here with you.
OPRAH: [holding up large white hardback book with a picture of small beige boy weeping on its jacket] We’ve talked about a lot of memoirs on the show—Steve Pilbrow’s Please Do It To The Cat Instead, Daddy1, Susan Woomera’s Tears In My Gruel, and Desmond Moines Ouch, That Smarts—but yours is something special, following on as it does from your multi-million selling Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.
BARRY: Could I just take this opportunity to thank all my readers, from all parts of this great nation—black, white, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Jewish; rich, middle-class, and bitter—who have been kind enough to buy my previous books?
AUDIENCE: [applause, whistles, whoops]
OPRAH: …Sure, Barry. Of course…
BARRY: …When I was a young man, working as a volunteer in a soup kitchen at the Church Of The Thrice-Damned Honky, fighting with the unholy temptations of drugs, wondering if I would ever see my African daddy again, struggling to find an identity, sometimes I dreamt that one day I would have just this kind of opportunity, an opportunity to talk to all the people of America, the people in the red states and the blue, in boardrooms and on porches…
OPRAH: …Now, your new and most recent volume of reminiscences brings your amazing life story right up to date. In Not Without Lube, Aunty! you have dropped perhaps the biggest bombshell yet of your extraordinary career. You tell a shocking tale of how a previous close and trusted family friend, whom you only refer to in the book as “H”, together with her husband “W”, stalked you across all 58 states of America and subjected you to a sustained and systematic campaign of abuse…
BARRY: …I think we gotta be careful here not to exaggerate the scale of her cruelty, Oprah…
OPRAH: …Barry, I have to stop you there. I have to say that “abuse” is the only word that’s appropriate. We’re talking about a pattern of destructive behaviour that—as you write in the terrifying climax of your book—only stopped when you persuaded her husband W to shoot her with a grenade launcher and push her into a vat of molten metal…
BARRY: …Did I mention my daddy was a goatherd? In Africa?…
- I stole this [↩]
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